October

I can't believe that October is already 2/3 finished! Man, time flies when you have a pile of stuff on your plate.

October, as I just alluded to, has been a busy, busy month. To put it in perspective, it's the end of GES's first academic term, which means final exams, report cards & massive evaluations. Being the librarian, IT guy, resource manager & high school computer teacher, let's just say that there was a bit of massive multitasking going on. However, on top of the regular humdrum of end of term, the best possible thing decided to happen: our school's computer network was infected with a virus.

Now, usually, this wouldn't be a very big deal in most organisations, because most organisations run antivirus software on their computers (like GES does), but here's the catch: GES, being an institution with widely-available access to Thai-version software (aka "pirated") was "protecting" its computers with a non-functional antivirus software suite. Pretty much, this means that the computer would tell you that it had a virus on it, but it had no method of actually fixing the problem.

The type of virus that infected our computer network was a very pernicious worm, that would make copies of itself in every unprotected folder that it could find & then broadcast itself to every computer on the network 3 times every second, which meant that as soon as you cleaned one computer, it would be barraged by about 800 new copies of the virus by the time you blinked your eyes. The problem was manageable on staff computers, as they were advised to remove themselves from the wireless network, scan their computers, do a clean-up & sit on their feet until the problem was solved. The real problem came around when we looked at our file server.

All of GES's important documents— including everything from students' attendance & academic records right up to Ministry of Education accreditation requirements—have been residing on one computer on the school's network, using one consumer-grade hard drive. Now, consumer-grade hard drives are designed for what's called "light duty," aka, random access of files every once & a while. When the virus hit the network, it caused a burst of activity on the server, making the hard drive work non-stop for 4 days before I decided to finally pull the network plug as a last resort to ensure the hard drive didn't literally go up in smoke & GES lose all of its files.
After finally containing the virus, cleaning the file server & checking its hard drives, we discovered that the main hard drive on the server was reporting a projected end-of-life on the 10th of October—right before report cards were due. This called for immediate action, and I was sent on a mission to find some sort of solution that would both fix the problem _and_ ensure that the data on our hard drive(s) wouldn't be placed in such jeopardy again.

***NERD ALERT!! Pass the next paragraph or two, if you don't like computer jargon ;)***

For the computer nerds in the crowd, here's what my solution eventually became (due to budgetary constraints): a new motherboard with 2GB DDR2-PC2300 ram, supporting our current CPU (P4 Northwood) and upgr3adeable to a Core2 Duo on the future; 3 new 120 GB 7200rpm WD SATA-2 HDDs installed in the on-board controllers & designed to be configured as a software managed RAID-5 under XP Pro (using a registry tweak & some hex editing of disk management dlls).

Now, as I tried to put all this stuff together, everything went smoothly—even the XP Pro RAID-5 management... Until I rebooted. Turns out that due to SP3, the wonderful work-around to use RAID-5 in XP Pro had been compromised by the Microsoft guys, and every time the system rebooted, the array needed to regenerate. Uugh. Then I noticed something peculiar... One of the drives I had purchased for the array was reporting bad sectors. It was brand new! In fact, every time I ran chkdsk to fix the sectors, more & more clusters came back as reportedly "bad." I whipped out my S.M.A.R.T. log reader, looked at the drive details & discovered that the hard drive which was sold to me a "new" actually had about 160 logged hours on it. Hrm.. Something was suspect. At any rate, the drive needed to be returned because if it was already reporting bad sectors, the problem would only get worse & RAID-5 or no, the data was running a high risk of compromise.
Round two to the computer place, Pantip. This time, I commandeered our helpful & friendly Jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Mike—a Filipino missionary working at the school who is semi-fluent in Thai—to come with & help with the return process. A few hours later, and we were back at the school with a fresh drive ready to be thrown into the array.

Because the software RAID was initialising every time Windows rebooted, it became painfully clear that a different OS was needed. Thankfully, I had enough insight to purchase a Thai copy of Win2k3—which was originally going to be used as an experimental install for our new library database server—and with that, I tossed out XP & gave the file server a proper server OS. Night & day difference, let me tell you. Night and day! I had never before in my life touched a server OS, and now that I've seen what they can do... I am in awe.

***End Nerd Alert***

Of course, all this computer fixing stuff that I needed to do was considered high-priority, but I also needed to do it after business hours, seeing as I was still teaching & running the library from 7:30-5:30. Talk about late nights. And talk about doing all that as well as preparing my own grades for report cards (who woulda thought creating report card grades for 97 computers students would be time consuming?). Then, of course, there was the room provisioning/registration for overnight camp, the outstanding library fines reports that needed to be given to teachers so that delinquent fines could be collected before report cards were sent home, the negotiation of the new library software purchase, other software/hardware meetings regarding data security & numerous administrative hiccups along the way (apparently, high school students are required to have a computers grade, even if they're not enrolled in any computers class due to military service!).

Sigh. I'm glad that those weeks are finished. The first thing that I did on Friday after school was go out with a dozen of the other teachers to an Irish pub & celebrate the beginning of our break with a pint of Guinness, a huge bacon cheeseburger and a pint of Hoegaarden to finish off the evening. Delightful. Delightful & well deserved.

Other things that happened in October so far go like this:

• Two weeks ago, I was invited by the pastor of the same church up in Lopburi (small provincial town 2.5 hours north of Bangkok) to come back & preach again. I did. It went well, though there were less people in attendance that Sunday when compared to the one previous. Speculations were made that it might've been due to rice planting season.


• That same Sunday, I asked to try some barbecued rat... And the family with which I went to Lopburi bought me a whole rodent. I ate it with some of the teachers later that evening on campus. Rat tastes exactly like baby-back pork ribs. No lie. If you're a Facebooker, I've a video posted with us eating it.


• The term is over & many teachers have gone abroad, as per usual October breaks. My original plans were to go to Chiang Mai with a group of teachers, but due to the intensity of my past few weeks, I had absolutely zero desire to do stuff... And as a result, I'm staying in Bangkok for the break. The past 2 weeks of school typically had me in the office from 7:30 in the morning until 2:30 at night (no jokes, people. It was rough. My caffeine consumption went from 23 baht per week to 150 baht per day just to stay awake for those 14 days. This past Friday, we got back from the pub at midnight; I didn't crawl out of bed until 2:00 Saturday afternoon. That was an amazing sleep). I'm planning on laying low in the city until November, when the term resumes.

I don't know if there's much more to say at this point... If you're a praying person, you could pray that:

• the teachers return refreshed & encouraged from the much needed break
• the students, also, would be refreshed from the break
• our focus as an organisation would gravitate back toward a central goal of displaying Christ & that our daily/weekly activities would reflect that.
• over the break, teachers & staff would be spiritually revived & willing to go the extra mile to make the ministry potential maximised.

A special note/prayer request:

One of the families at GES—the very same that takes me to Lopburi—is looking to plant a church in their community, one that is directed on reaching the 16-26 year-old demographic. Being Bangkok, real estate is not cheap & they're having difficulties finding a space wherein the church could possibly meet: options—renting or buying—seem bleak, considering the financial situation. Many of the Christian students at GES don't have a church that they can attend, and this would be an amazing opportunity to meet the spiritual needs of the community. The idea is to run a café on the building's main floor as finance-generation for ongoing operational costs, have the second floor as a meeting space for the church & sub-let the third floor to students or others who need a place to live (for further finance generation / outreach [perhaps rent at an extremely low rate]). The problem is the start-up cost(s). If you all could pray for the Lord to work in this situation & provide a means for this project to be realised, that would be awesome. Furthermore, if you—any of you—know of any organisations or groups or people what would be interested in sponsoring/supporting or investing in such a venture, please let me know. I'm working with this family to see if we can actually make this thing a reality.

Thanks for reading this (again) novella. Your time & patience with my verbosity is greatly appreciated :).

A Knowingly Late Update…

Hi RSS feed services, webcrawlers / search engine robots & the occasional human reader!


Well, I'm going to apologise up front for this being a late update. It's been, I think, a month since the last time I enlightened you with details of my life in Thailand. Let's hope that this upcoming month won't be as scant with updates.

To say that September has been a busy month would be a bit of an understatement. Professionally and personally alike, much has transpired in the 9th month of 2008. Here's a play by play:

• In my computers class, we started work on the final term projects—Photoshop collages. They were assigned the first week of September & they're due the last week of the semester (next week). Students being students, 85% of them hadn't even begun thinking about the assignment until this past week.


• We (the foreign administration & I) successfully canvassed for the school to invest in a digital library cataloguing tool—a huge improvement over the nonexistent catalogue that they currently have "given" me.


• I've begun organising/updating the fiction section of the library with reading level codes. The previous system was cryptic for Thai students to follow & it made (makes) for confusion when someone other than I tries to re-shelf books. The current tagging on the books classifies levels from lowest to highest thusly: JE, E, JF, F… And maybe even N after that. ESL people routinely get confused by these codes, which is why I'm beginning to phase in reading level codes by using regular polygons: easiest being a triangle, the hardest being a 6-pointed star with a + in the centre. I think it's a good system, but only time will tell….


• I've received a library assistant! Hooray! This means that the relatively simple tasks of checking in books & re-shelving items won't take up so much of my day. Instead, I can focus on organisation, streamlining & my IT responsibilities. The downside, as to which I previously alluded, is that re-shelving has been hit & miss—not only with "which books belong to which collection" but also _where_ individual books are supposed to go. I'm patiently learning longsuffering as 2 or 3 times a week, I spend a few hours of my evening re-organising the entire collection. If this pattern persists into this week, I think I'm going to have a chat with her, just to clear things up.


• The school's computer network has been growing & as a result, is experiencing growing pains. The consumer-grade components that we're using are beginning to fail, but the school seems unwilling, at times, to invest in the proper equipment their infrastructure. This problem is compounding (see the next point) & I'm getting to the point of having to sacrifice security & stability for a consistent "almost fully working" network environment (which includes internet)


• Due to Thailand's customary software piracy, the school's computer network got hit by a virus this past week which crippled pretty much everything. I say that this happened because of piracy, because the "purchased" antivirus software that the school had installed on its computers kept the computers safe from viruses as well as a screen door keeps out -40 degree winds. Our main server (where all of our teaching resources, term grades & student records) was riddled with over 13,000 (no exaggeration, folks) copies of the same virus as it gleefully spread through & infected every folder that it had time to traipse through. My entire Friday (minus teaching time) was devoted to damage control & reparations. We're still in the process of purging the network from infection…


• Last weekend was our Professional Development weekend. It was an interesting & good time, which gave us opportunities to learn & grow (if even only a little bit).


• There has been restoration in a couple of my relationships over here. Over the past couple months, two of my relationships had suffered. The first was with one of my former students, a girl who considers me her big brother—a feeling which I reciprocate. She had become increasingly distant over the past few months, owing to her being rapt by her new boyfriend. As 16 year-olds go, it's common for people that age not to understand that balance & maintenance is needed in order to keep healthy relationships in your life. Thursday last week, she had become a little overwhelmed by the realisation that not only had she inadvertently pushed me away, but also her other closest friends. We had a good, long talk & I was able to counsel her through understand why others were feeling the way they were. Her relationships now are on the mend, owing to her good efforts & humble spirit. It's awesome. I love her & I love watching her grow.
  

What's Ahead

That's mostly what I've done in the past month. Things on the horizon look something like this:

• I've been asked to speak again at the church in Lopburi, a city 2.5 hours north of Bangkok, where I met the formerly quadriplegic guy. That goes live tomorrow (probably at/before the time you read this). —I just got back from there, actually. It was good times. The pastor of teh church heard that I was interested in eating rat, so he bought me one. It's in my fridge as we speak & I'll be eating it in about a half-hour!


• This upcoming Friday will be a "work day" for GES Staff wherein we prepare for report cards, which get sent out in 10 days, and for school accreditation tasks. I, no doubt, will be busy working in the library & on other resource initiatives.


• Report cards go home in 10 days, which means that our October Break is just around the bend. I may go up to Chiang Mai for a few days with some other teachers to visit a mutual friend (Mink, for those of you who know her) that's stationed up there with Compassion International. During that break, I'd expect that I'll have enough time to write back to all of the personal correspondence that has accumulated on my desk & in my e-mail / facebook accounts. I apologise for the delay, but if you can hold out for another 10ish days, you should get a treat in your mailboxes.

What You Can Do

• You can pray for the staff. We're in the end-of-term crunch, which means accumulated stress. You can also pray for teachers' safety as they mostly go on random crazy trips throughout SE Asia during October break. You can pray (and please do, fervently) for the spiritual environment at GES. It's difficult on even the good days to be mindful of the foreign staff's personal primary objective of ministering to the students & their families for the advancement of the gospel—even if the upper echelons of the school have other objectives for us in mind. I'm pretty sure that you could ask any Christian staff member here & they'd say that we're not really supported by the school spiritually. It's produce produce produce, without the invest invest invest. Pray, also, for our students—that they'd be willing to take the risk of becoming a cultural pariah in order to gain the love & spirit-filled existence of communing with Christ.


• If you want to know more, now is a great time to ask me questions, as I should have a lot of free time in the second half of October with which I could get back to you ;).

Thanks for your patience & willingness to be involved—if even from a distance—in my semblance of ministry in Thailand.